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You are most likely here because you enjoy crafting. I have been reading up on some of the WoW issues regarding gold making, which make me realize that WoW is not the game for me.

If you want to play a game where gathering and crafting is the cornerstone of the economy, and are not faint of heart, I recommend EVE Online. EVE even has releases purely to support industry. You can play for free if you are good enough manufacturer or trader.

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03 August 2011

Darkmoon trinket creation randomness.

This post is part 2 of a series. In my last post, I talked about how trinket making had 90% profits, with some large caveats.

This post is looking at the randomness of how many cards it takes to make a trinket. The preious post assumed cards would come in order and you would be left with no wasted cards. Umm, that was optomistic. I would allow for 4%-8% wasted cards.

The basic process again is :

Gather herbs and volatile life

Mill herbs -> Inks (Blackfallow & Inferno)

Combine Inferno inks and Volatile life to create an individual card (Ace to Eight of one of the 4 standard card suites)

Combine 8 different cards of the same suite to create a deck.

Turn the deck into a trinket during the Darkmoon Faire.

One idea bandied about is that you need to craft 32 cards on average to make your first trinket; assuming you don't buy individual cards from the AH. I think the number is closer to 50, based on this google docs simulator. Even after making 10,000 cards, my simluator suggests that I will have about 1150 trinkets and about 800 (8%) unused cards. Some readers may make 1150 trinkets. I doubt I will.

The individual cards can be bought and sold on the AH. Conventional wisdom says that if you have a surplus of one card (eg 8 of the winds), but need a different card (say 3 of the winds), you will sell your surplus card on the AH, and try to purchase the card you need.

In my 10,000 card scenario, trading 30 cards allows me to make 30 more trinkets, using up 240 of the 800 surplus cards.

However, you have also potentially allowed your competitors to do the same, meaning increased competition for completed trinket sales.

If I only have one (or possibly two depending on my mood) extra card, I will sit on it.

I will sell surplus cards where :

I have a few extra cards, and they are listed above 1/8 of the completed trinket sale price; or

I have a lot of extra cards.

I will purchase cards where :

I need them to complete a deck, and they are at or below market prices

I need a lot of one card to complete multiple decks.

The are significantly below completed trinket price and I only have a few of that card

To the peanut gallery, for this post, I am specifically looking for debate on:

your observations on the randomness of cards, and/or

selling/purchasing surplus/shortfall cards.

In answer to yesterday's comment : Cold has been trying to get out of darkmoon trinkets, and has some cards he can not shift. According to my simulation, there will always be cards that are surplus to a servers requirements. If you want out, liquidate, but try both faction's AH.

Postscript in response to Zamboni
(It's a bother to put tables in comments, so I have added a postscript.).
Random chance is enough to explain the shortage in cards. Statistics are funny like that.

You say you have made hundreds of trinkets, lets call it 400, and see what my simlator suggests.
I ran it about 20 times making 3660 cards ~ 1/2 gave more than 400, ~ 1/2 than 400 and one gave exactly 400.

6 comments:

For the complainers that say that DM trinkets dont sell you are being too greedy.

1. Undercut generously. When a buyer sees yours for 500g cheaper than the other guy, he has 1 more reason to buy a DM trinket. The more reasons, the more likely he will will click Buy (think new car and all the lurvely features that are irrelevant to the purchase but make the sale more enticing).

2. When the price is reset to an absurdly high price of course if u try to get that price you're not gonna get a sale. List yours for the real market value plus an undercut. This is an even faster sale because now you're talking about a 2k discount between your price and the asshole above you.

Saying that you can even give away Earthquakes for free is a ridiculous exaggeration. Would someone buy it for 1g? What about 10g? What about 100g? What about 500g? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Keep scaling up, dont be a greedy gob and hold out for 2.9k just because the sky is blue. 1.9k instant sale.

I would plan on 52 cards to get your first deck, and 12 cards per deck after that. (My first Cata deck came at 48 cards.) Make 10 decks, have 80 loose cards left over. Make 20 decks, have 120 cards left over. (Last time I counted, I had more than 250 loose Darkmoon cards in the bank. You will want to increase your mats cost estimates by 50% to cover useless cards.)

I'm positive it's not an even 1-32 distribution on the cards. I am perpetually short of the same cards, and I'm increasingly overstocked (20+) on others. We're 8 months and hundreds of decks into Cataclysm, and pattern just gets worse with each Faire.

"However, you have also potentially allowed your competitors to do the same, meaning increased competition for completed trinket sales."

This is why I don't sell my cards, even the ones I have full stacks of. I'm paranoid that each card I sell means another deck to compete against, and drop in price on the trinket will be more than I made from the card. I do buy cards that will complete decks, and I may buy extras of ones I'm running low on if they're cheap.

Buying the cards you need to complete decks can be tricky, since odds are most of the cards in the AH are useless and the ones you need aren't there. The uneven distribution means everyone is dumping the same cards, and we're all missing the same cards to make our decks. The missing cards will only come from small-time card makers who sell each card as they make it, so these will show up randomly and be purchased quickly. (Large scale card makers won't list their rare cards, so no luck there.)

Zamboni - I agree that some cards are more rare than others. On 400 decks, being overstocked by 20+ on some cards is nearly guaranteed by random chance. Please read the stats added to the bottom of the main post.

Not selling your cards is an option. If you are monopolist in nature (and many traders are), then don't sell your surplus.

However, If I am slightly 'overweight' on a card, and others are short on it, I'll sell at a premium. If I'm heavily overweight on a card, I will sell for what I can get.

I am going to be investing quite heavily into next Faire Foo as a last attempt to see if it works for me from a profit perspective.

I currently have 70 cards, inlcuding ~5 that I bought this morning, with 0 completed trinkets, yes I'm that lucky.

For me it seems that it is always the same cards that are missing, but it is RNG because what was a hard card for me to get 2 months ago I now have four of whereas with a card that I had eight of two months ago, I can't get today.

I've bought a few thousand gold worth of whiptail and cinderbloom and will be milling it shortly (possibly tonight) as well as inferno inks I'm buying directly off the AH at 29g per ink.

The plan is to purchase enough inferno inks / volatiles to make between 50 and 100 more cards in the next few weeks before the September Faire, which would cost me approximately 30,000 - 60,000 gold if purchased off the AH at today's current market prices.

Once I know more, I will post back and let you know how it goes. I may even segregate the cards I'm making this round so that we have a good sample.

Due to the blog mostly being inactive and the only comments recently being anonymous spam; I have restricted comments to "Registered Users"; hat includes anything google recognises as an account (google, openId, wordpress etc). I am still (mostly) active on foo-eve.blogspot.com

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Disagreements are welcome - especially on speculative posts. I love a great disagreement.